I didn’t mention goals and scores; I mentioned contracts. Understanding that the player gets 1 point per forest and −1 point per hole seems to me like a reasonable thing for the software to do. However, understanding that I’ve agreed to freeze the lake at coordinate X within 5 turns but only if you first create a forest at coordinate Y within 3 turns, and having the software automatically kill me as soon as I violate this agreement, seems extremely hard, because it requires defining some sort of contract language that players can use to input what contracts they’ve made. I’d guess that’s at least several times more work than everything else in the application combined, and I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to make it sufficiently user-friendly for typical players to be willing to use it.
I didn’t mention goals and scores; I mentioned contracts. Understanding that the player gets 1 point per forest and −1 point per hole seems to me like a reasonable thing for the software to do. However, understanding that I’ve agreed to freeze the lake at coordinate X within 5 turns but only if you first create a forest at coordinate Y within 3 turns, and having the software automatically kill me as soon as I violate this agreement, seems extremely hard, because it requires defining some sort of contract language that players can use to input what contracts they’ve made. I’d guess that’s at least several times more work than everything else in the application combined, and I’m not sure whether it’s even possible to make it sufficiently user-friendly for typical players to be willing to use it.